The Idiot

There is a moment, in the seconds before a seizure takes him, when Prince Myshkin feels every jarring thing in existence fall into one harmony so perfect he would give his whole life for it. He arrives in Petersburg from a Swiss clinic carrying no cunning and no self-defense, only a clarity so total that the people around him read it as idiocy. Dostoevsky set himself the hardest task in all of fiction, to put a genuinely good man on the page, and his discovery was stranger than failure: goodness like this is not beaten by the world's cruelty but by what it does to those who need it most. To love the ruined Nastasya Filippovna is to insist she is worth saving, and that is the one tenderness she cannot bear. The novel moves at a fever, scenes erupting in drawing rooms and on railway platforms, confessions blurted to strangers, every evening ending in some fresh public wound. Beauty will save the world, Myshkin believes, and the book spends six hundred pages testing whether the world will let it.